The Green Monster of Cuiaba and Other Tales
by Rustam
Summary: An improvised origin story for Blanka, one of the original World Warriors, guest starring Dan Hibiki and Karin Kanzuki.


There are places even today, deep within the rainforest that surrounds the meandering Amazon River, where men and women who exist within the safety and trappings of civilization have never lain eyes. Only now is the untapped potential of this wild and uncontrolled natural laboratory being realized, as pharmaceutical companies and biologists discover new and unknown sources of natural medicine on what is practically a weekly basis. The problem is their sheer inaccessibility. Miles and miles of vast, unexplored terrain, previously unknown species of fauna and even flora that cause the word 'monster' to rise to the lips of the otherwise rational human being, and even human beings themselves, continuing for thousands of years a lifestyle that the Western World can barely comprehend. Yet for some, the price is one they are willing to pay.

Jaime Alonzo Berenguer Emiliano Rodriguez y Aguinaldo, or 'Jimmy' as his family affectionately called him, of the wealthy Rodriguez family of Montevideo, in Garibaldi's happy land of Uruguay, was barely out of the womb when the doctors discovered a terrible secret he had carried with him. An incurable disease, a cancer, that spread at an unstoppable rate and seemed to have no cure, treatment, or even cause. All the doctors of Uruguay shook their heads and hung their heads at the hopeful, bewildered stare of Senora Rodriguez, a beautiful woman of high breeding and class, reduced to tears and helplessness and the state of her only child. Senor Rodriguez, a strong, quiet man, a proud descendant of _gauchos_, took the news stoically, an arm upon the shoulder of his beautiful wife as he stared these learned men in the eye. "There is nothing that can be done?"

Precisely at that moment, Rodriguez family retainers burst into the hospital offices, bringing with them a man surely out of legend itself. Dark-skinned, with wild white hair covering his head and face, zig-zagging white markings emblazoned upon his body with paint that stank of tree sap, moving with an air of stateliness and majesty that humbled all within the room. An interpreter, out of breath and covered in sweat, endeavored to tell the wide-eyed Rodriguez couple the words this man slowly sang in a soft, yet resonant tone.

"_The tree spreads her leaves across the world_

_The tree is our mother_

_She spreads her arms to hold us safe_

_Men are her children._

_We are sick, and she makes us well_

_We are lost, and she finds us_

_On the beasts who hunt our children_

_She takes our revenge_

_On the demons that plague our blood_

_She is their keeper_

_Binding their might_

_We sleep safe in the arms of our Mother._"

He presented the Rodriguez family with a single leaf, laying it upon the boy's forehead. As the interpreter stumbled over his words, the man, whose name was Anyi - a powerful shaman of the Achuilango tribe of the Amazon interior - claimed he had crossed the mountains of Bolivia for the gods had told him that the great Jaguar God of their people, Blanqua, had been reborn in their son. He grew excited at that point, whirling to face the parents, gesturing to them with his staff. In a stern voice he declared that Mocancha, the Blood Demon, had returned as well and was trying to kill their son before he realized his destiny. "Long ago the people of Mocancha crossed the mountains from the Lake of Fire, and enslaved the Achuilango," he related. "All the Children of the Mother Tree were forced to work upon great mountains of stone, square and angular, abominable copies of mountains they made in their defiance of nature itself. In retaliation our Mother Tree sang the song of Wind, driving the Blood Demon crazy, and in his insanity slaying his own people, their flesh becoming bulbous and corrupt, their bodies withering and falling away. The Achuilango returned to our lands and were never bothered again."

An Argentinian anthropologist from the university at Buenos Aires was later to advance a theory. "The Moche city-state, who occupied Peru long before the Inca, were great pyramid builders," he was to inform. "Their entire civilization, however, vanished long ago without a trace, save for the great monuments they built which the Inca admired and strove to imitate. What if by enslaving the Achuilango tribe they exposed themselves to some sort of disease the Achuilango carried with them from deep in the jungle? One which only that tribe had an immunity to? And as a result, the Moche were wiped off the face of the Earth."

Further questioning prompted the shaman only to point at the leaf he had placed upon young Jaime's head, as the boy slept, temporarily untroubled by the pain that was his existence. "Only the leaf of the Great Mother Tree kept the Achuilango safe," he informed them. "Only she can help Blanqua, Jaguar King."

The Rodriguez family, at that point, had little in the way of alternatives.

Immediately an expedition was mounted to escort the shaman back to his homeland, deep in southwestern Brazil. Mercenaries hired by the Rodriguez family were outfitted while members of the Uruguayan foreign service negotiated with the skeptical government of their giant neighbor to the north. Jaime was made ready to travel as best they could make him, and was dispatched by helicopter to a hastily constructed field hospital outside Porto Velho were samples of the recovered leaves were to be studied and administered to the dying child, while his parents would follow as fast as they could by conventional means.

Unfortunately politics intruded in a way that proved tragic. A military coup in nearby Paraguay had placed that country on high alert as Manuel Ramos Gonzalez-Esarhaddon matched wits in the final battle with his arch-nemesis, General Lucian Carlos Sanchez de Obregon. Believing the helicopter to be drug-runners allied with General Sanchez, members of the communist PURC insurgent group shot it down with a rocket-propelled grenade, the engine exploding, rotors shearing off into the trees as the helicopter cab - a plastic bubble reinforced with ultra-density lightweight ceramics and explosive ejection bolts - plunged into the river just over the Brazilian border in the Pantanal. A crying, squalling Jimmy, too young to understand what was happening, was the only survivor.

A day passed, and the smell of death, and the sound of a crying child, was heard on the wind, deep in the jungle where the plastic bubble sat in the river. It was at this point that a black jaguar, alpha female of her pride, discovered that a small, pink, crying creature, clutched in the arms of a dead human, still lived upon the banks of the river she passed as her pride migrated north for the summer. Having recently lost two of her own cubs to poachers, the jaguar felt pity on the boy. Gently grasping him by the collar of his pajamas, the jaguar carried him back to her pride, meeting the shocked glances of her peers with a narrowed gaze that held an implied threat, a challenge to all who disputed her right to do what she wished. It was not answered, and the pride continued upon its way.

The only real problem with this human infant, despite its complete helplessness of course, was the noise it was making. The smell of disease was all around him. Jaime's Jaguar foster-mother realized that if the boy was not given help, he would surely die, and she would lose yet another cub, becoming alone once more. Doggedly she pressed her pride forward, until at last they reached the breeding lands of the north, and the home of what in fact was their patron.

Deep in a hidden jungle valley in a remote part of Brazil, north of Cuiaba and south of Porto Velho, miles from the Rio Branco, the nearest major tributary of the Amazon, resided a secret that had been kept for millions of years. A race of giant trees, some the size of villages, sheltered and protected a cross-section of Amazonian life from the ravages of the outside world. Birds, mammals, insects, grubs, other plants, river and pool dwelling fish, and even tribes of Native Americans, the trees' leafy canopies rising high into the sky and intermingling to such a degree that the forest floor was completely inscrutable to whoever might happen to be looking from above. The trees provided a nutritious sap, edible plants, and wild game, while those who lived among them protected the valley from outsiders, cultivated food, fertilized the earth with their excretions, and fought off rival plant life that might prove inimical to the trees' survival, such as creeper vines and outsider flora. Natural selection and the passage of time had specialized the behavior of the trees, and the animals and plants under their protection, to a symbiotic relationship that allowed all parties to thrive.

The trees, over time, had also modified their biochemistry to be beneficial to their symbiotic partners. The more their charges survived, the more they survived. As such the leaves of these trees carried complex proteinaceous compounds that could not only cure a host of diseases, but also over time had made minor improvements to the physiology and neurochemistry of the beings in their care. The scourge of Mocancha was quite well known to them and, without even knowing why, simply obeying behaviors that had been passed down through thousands of generations, the mother jaguar proceeded to chew the leaves of the host trees and carefully administered them, every day, mouth-to-mouth, to the boy Jimmy. At last, the poor child's crying began to subside.

The cure was not without a price, however. As time went on and the cure took hold, the only way it could defeat the disease inside was to alter Jimmy's genetic code, finally even rewriting flawed sections of DNA that made him vulnerable to the cancer's attack. The trees, after all, were simply plants, and had nothing of what human beings understand as consciousness; their cure was the result of millennia of trial and error, simply using what worked, whether it worked particularly well or not. As time went on, Jimmy's body began to change as he grew, as well as his mind, now exposed to the haphazard genetic manipulation of the symbiont forest. From an early age he was able to reason - soon he went out hunting with his jaguar pride, fingernails growing into claws, teeth sharpening and elongating to tear his prey as they did. His body was constantly full of a soup of genetically reactive chemicals as the leaf-medicine fought Mocancha's legacy to a stalemate, the plague actually seeming to grow dormant when exposed to a regular supply of tree-sap. The humans of the forest avoided him; he was a white man's child, or 'o blanca' they called him in the white demon language (in Portuguese it would be 'o branquito', in Spanish 'el blanquito', but the Spanish-Portuguese-Indian pidgin dialects that had taken root there, close to the Bolivian border, had a syntax all their own), and hence unclean, as well as the favorite of the fierce and terrible Jaguar queen. Someone to be avoided. For most of Jimmy's early life, as he slowly attained consciousness, he had no conception that he wasn't a jaguar, or even particularly different than the other jaguars. His only concession to his humanity was his idea of himself. "Blanka," he called himself, for that was the sound his mother made when she wished to attract his attention, halfway between a word and a cough, in addition to the word the other humans called him. The name 'Jimmy' was becoming a dim and distant memory. Yet for the most part, even for all his animalistic behaviors and appearance, he still was recognizably human.

One day, however, as he was tussling with some of the other cubs, he came near an eddy in a stream infested with electric eels. The other cubs refused to go near it, their noises twitching with the smell of ozone and danger, but Blanka was hungry, he was curious, and he was young and foolish. And clumsy.

The eels, smelling Blanka awash in the scent of the trees that were their benefactors, providers, and healers as well as they were for the creatures of the land, immediately swarmed all over him, biting, writhing, and bombarding him with electric shocks, assuming he was prey that the forest's land-walking servants had provided for them. It was here that the strange and exotic cancer that still lingered in Blanka's body began to react. Upon contact with electricity, the cancerous cells underwent a chemical change, releasing plasmids that made alterations of his heredity as well. What had once been cancerous tissue became highly specialized, forming into layers and layers of muscle; the exchange of bodily fluids from the attack by the eels provided new samples of DNA that were incorporated into Blanka's genetic code, particularly the ability to harness and house electricity. Still a child, despite his advancing intelligence, Blanka could hardly understand what was happening to him.

Deep in a laboratory in the United States, a paleobotanist working for a university that had received generous donations from the Rodriguez family of Uruguay, hardly aware that the reason he was doing so was lost in the Amazon due to the concerns of the boy's parents too desperate in the search for their son's recovery to worry about side projects, was making a startling discovery. The Mocancha cancer and the leaf sample they had been provided with by Anyi, the shaman, had a common ancestor. Long ago the latent disease had been passed along by generations of Amazon tribesmen from the trees that protected and sheltered them, but the disease was dormant. Only when the supply of antidote, a chemical in the trees' edible leaves, was cut off, did the disease become active. Enslaved by the Moche, the Achuilango tribe had carried with them supplies of their sacred leaf, which kept them free from symptoms while it became pandemic among the Moche who had abducted them and forced them into slavery. Long ago the trees had evolved this behavior in order to preserve their supply of servants and protect them from others of their own kind. In addition, the virus carrying the genetic codes for the epidemic had been programmed to release plasmids into their carriers which would, in the event of undue stress, fear, pain, or torment, would assist their body in recovery, enhance their strength, and make them resilient enough to resist their oppressors and better facilitate their return journey to the mother trees. The triggers were certain electrochemical reactions in the brain; as such, his body coursing with electric current, fear and terror raging within his mind, the viruses in Blanka's body began to go haywire.

What emerged from the pool was no longer human - his hair was like wire, his body bulged with muscles, his skin was a pale green as chloroplasts created from the DNA of the leaves he'd been eating started gathering electrical energy from the sun itself. This electricity coursed across his body in arcs of raw power. Nearby tribesmen stared upon this fearsome sight and fell to their knees. Blanqua, Jaguar God, had returned.

This awe was, unfortunately for Blanka, not shared by his foster mother, who promptly trotted up to him and head-butted him in the leg, knocking him off his feet, for running off and nearly getting himself killed like that.

Now Blanka was the most formidable hunter of the rain forest. For years the legend persisted of the Green Monster of Cuiaba, who became something of a South American Bigfoot. Supermarket tabloids claimed sightings, documentaries were produced on Brazilian television, and even the Sao Paulo _Gazeta Mercantil_ promised a reward for any hard evidence that could be produced of this bizarre phenomenon. Soon, however, the forests of the Rio Branco faced an even more inexorable threat to their way of life than the mass media: progress. Brazilian mining and forestry interests slowly encroached upon the valley, and sightings of the Indians who lived within, and of the Monster of Cuiaba, became ever more frequent.

One day, as Blanka was out hunting alone, wanting the chance to be alone with his thoughts - he had, over the course of his young life, finally discovered one day that he was completely unique in the world he knew - the bulldozers came. The elders of the tribes were shown papers that a legal advocacy group fighting for their rights, who they'd never even known about, had lost a court case in the Supreme Court at far-off Brasilia, a place they'd never heard of, and a man named Judge Sebastiao Mercava, who they'd never met, had ordered that the potential development of the Rio Branco valley was in the national interest of a country they did not truly belong to, for the purpose of making money they would never be able to share in. Little did any of them realize that the corporation who had lobbied so hard to develop their forest was owned by a shadowy criminal organization known only as 'Shadowlaw', whose true, hidden purpose in their exploitation of the forest was to mine the trees themselves for the chemicals that enhanced the strength and physiology of the forests' inhabitants - with it, Shadowlaw's leader, General Vega, who lived in a far off land called Thailand, intended to produce a race of super-soldiers with which to one day exert his will over all who stood in his way.

And so it was that zoologists, trappers, hunters and biologists alike began the process of rounding up the local wildlife for relocation or exhibition. Tribesmen were evacuated, some at the point of a gun. It was all very civilized. Never once did the white men who came to the forest even have an inkling of how special and phenomenal this valley was. For all they knew the jaguars just grew that big and black because it was natural for them to. Or the caimans who prowled the waters were that large because they had plenty to eat. Or, later, how quickly the tribes of the forest, once exposed to the outside world, had learned Portuguese and English from missionaries. Perhaps they might have suspected how special they were when the entire forested erupted in noise, man and animal alike, as the loggers began to methodically chop down the trees that had stood there for millions of years. The shamans called upon the power of the Great Mothers to protect them; unfortunately, in all their history, the trees had never been threatened in this way directly. The disease of Mocancha lay in its dormant state - pharmaceutical companies, discovering the numerous curative properties of their leaves, would artificially replicate the compounds painstakingly developed over generations upon generations of trial and error in a few weeks, and even improve upon them. A minor epidemic weeks later as the leaf supply ran out would be quickly eradicated with no loss of life. It would be cold comfort to the Rodriguez family that a cure had finally been found for their long-vanished son's illness.

The strangest thing, however, was a jaguar dam, who had put up the most fight before succumbing to the white men's tranquilizers. It kept coughing so uncontrollably that at first everyone thought she was sick, but upon further examination was discovered to be perfectly healthy. "Though, you know, it wasn't really cough," they said to each other. "It sounded like it was saying 'buuhnca' or 'bluuunka'."

Upon his return, Blanka beheld what had become of his homeland, unable to comprehend what was going on. Where were the trees? Where were his friends? All at once, he was in another world. The image that stuck out at him the most, however, was the logo on the side of the bulldozers that were turning his home into a great, flat wasteland: a skull, wings extending from either side. The image was to haunt him for a long, long time to come.

Now, Blanka was alone. He wandered through the jungle, foraging where he could, either hunting for food or stealing it from the farms of the strange people who spoke an unknown language and fled in terror the moment they saw him. He began to guard his movements carefully, creeping silently in the night, and could soon pass through cities largely unobserved. It was in Rio de Janeiro, creeping from rooftop to rooftop at night and sleeping in dumpsters or any other hiding place he could find during the day, that he discovered the Japanese-Brazilian community of Rio de Janeiro (the largest community of Japanese people outside Japan), becoming entranced by the colorful cartoons and action-packed movies they watched, learning their language as he went, adding it to Portuguese and Spanish which he had also picked up in his travels from the jungle's other inhabitants. Even so, he never once felt like he belonged. This world was a strange and unusual place, with people completely unlike the others he had known.

One day Blanka sat down upon a rock overlooking a waterfall, scratching his head to try and make sense of it all, when he heard a mysterious cry. Leaning over the edge of the falls to see the banks of the pool below, he beheld a young jaguar, an ordinary, spotted jaguar of the regular variety, unlike the giant black ones who'd raised him, staring and blinking at a man wearing a bright pink karate gi and brandishing his fists at the jungle feline. "Innocent jungle creature!" the man called out in Japanese. "My name is Dan Hibiki, of Hong Kong! I have no quarrel with you. But for the sake of my training and the future of Hibiki Saikyo-Ryu Martial Arts, we must fight and I must win! Cho-ya-HUUUU!" With that high-pitched battle cry he dodged, feinted, and in particular rolled forward at the creature, shaking his fist as he went, shouting incomprehensible cries about how exactly he was going to defeat the uncomprehending cat.

The cat, rather nonchalantly, simply blinked before casually batting him away with a paw, then tilted his head curiously as Dan Hibiki struggled to his feet, shaking his fists with raw emotion. "He won't go down so easily, I see! He's made of sterner stuff! Magnificent! I shall receive a workout like I've never seen before, growing stronger with his eventual defeat! Wild jungle creature, I am your opponent! YOUSHAAAAAA!" With another cry, Dan charged at the jaguar, his face a terrible sight to behold.

Once again, the jaguar casually batted him away with a paw, sending him sprawling into the pool. This went on for a few minutes until, finally, Dan cowered upon the ground, soaking wet, pleading and begging the curious jaguar not to kill him. The jaguar merely padded over to him, batting at Hibiki with his paw curiously, sending the man into even greater heights of mortal terror.

Finally Blanka decided to intervene, jumping off the edge of the hill and quite easily landing on his feet on the banks of the pool below. The jaguar looked him curiously, recognizing him by smell as, if not another species of jaguar, then at least a friend to them. Blanka grunted, motioning toward the forest; with a toss of its tail, the jaguar seemed to shrug indifferently and trot off at a loping pace. Blanka went over to the man, leaned over him, stared at him a moment, and then poked him with a finger.

"Don't kill me! Don't kill me, the future of Saikyo-ryu itself is at stake!" the man wailed, before looking up to stare Blanka in the eyes. Blanka stared back. Dan Hibiki screamed. "AAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" screamed Blanka, waving his arms and stumbling backward.

"MONSTER!" wailed Dan Hibiki, stumbling backward himself.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" wailed Blanka, jerking his head around in mortal fear. "WHERE?!"

Eventually calming down, seeing Blanka was no threat and recognizing deliverance when he found it, Dan Hibiki finally realized that it was Blanka who was responsible for the daring and magnificent defeat of the fierce feline jungle terror! At least that's how Dan saw it. "You... you've saved me!" he breathed, in awe. He clapped his hands together, raising them high, even as he dropped to his knees. "Thank you very much indeed!" Dan told Blanka, in formal Japanese. "I am eternally grateful." Somersaulting and then jumping to his feet, Dan struck a dramatic pose, clenching a fist and raising a finger. "As is the WORLD!"

Blanka followed his finger with his eyes into the sky, seeing nothing but a flock of birds.

"For you see," said Dan, turning to Blanka again. "You have rescued from certain death none other than the future hope of the Saikyo-ryu fighting style..." He raised a clenched fist, his eyes burning with inner fire. "Dan... HIBIKI..."

Blanka blinked at him vacantly. Until his eyes grew wide, remembering martial arts movies and anime cartoons he'd seen leaning over roofs into the windows of Sao Paulo and Rio. "Really?" he said, awe in his face and in his tone. From that moment on, Blanka idolized Dan Hibiki.

After initial introductions, the two decided to travel together. Dan was on a journey to perfect his skills and be worthy of his status as the heir to the Hibiki Martial Arts Dojo, founded by his father - he had no fixed destination in mind, but believed that surely fate would place only the mightiest and worthiest fighters in his path in order to help him find his destined place in the world. As he explained this to Blanka, in the most dramatic and inspiring terms possible, Blanka for his part hung raptly on Dan's every word.

"Surely Timmy here is a formidable fighter indeed!" said Dan, rubbing his chin and narrowing his eyes at his companion during a lull in conversation. Blanka, oblivious, was picking grubs out of his copious chest hair and eating them. "No doubt he is destined to be my sidekick and student! But not yet. Not while my own training must continue..."

Finally the duo reached a town called Boa Vista where Dan was to face a team of skilled mercenaries who were famous for their martial arts prowess, known as the Ikari Warriors. "No doubt it will be a glorious victory indeed!" said Dan with a firm nod of his head. "But I'm afraid it is here we must part. This is a road I must travel alone, in order to perfect my skills and become a Master of the Martial Arts." He held out his hand to Blanka, who had large round tears falling from his eyes at the prospect of parting from his only friend. "No tears! No tears," admonished Dan, shaking his head, his own lower lip trembling, the two friends and fellow travelers on the path of the warrior clasping their arms in a comradely grip. "When I have finished my journey, you can find me in Hong Kong! And you are assured a place of honor at my feet, learning the skills which, this very day, I will test against all comers. Farewell!" He handed Blanka a card with his address, which Blanka lifted to his face with both hands to read, while Dan ran off in the other direction to face his destiny. "YAYUSUUUUU!"

"What's it say?" Blanka asked, lifting his face up again, but Dan was gone. In all his travels thus far, Blanka had yet to learn how to read. As Blanka mournfully trundled off, he heard Dan's shouts and the sounds of furious combat in the distance. No doubt Dan Hibiki was giving a brutal lesson in the power of Saikyo-Ryuu to his latest opponents. Though it sounded like he was the only one making loud noises. Probably taunting his adversaries to attack them psychologically!

Blanka resolved not to let down the great man who'd been the first human to show such an interest in him. He was going to become worthy of learning to fight at the Hibiki Dojo in Hong Kong! Only he wasn't quite sure how to do that. Until one day, when he was stalking poachers in the forests outside Manaus, he happened upon a dying man lying face down in the middle of a small clearing, who wouldn't move even after Blanka prodded him with a stick. His chest rose and fell, however, so Blanka knew he was still alive. As Blanka was debating whether or not to help, his blood froze at the sight of an emblem on the man's jacket - a death's head grin, wings extending from either side. Blanka had little time to be scared, however, for soon armed soldiers burst into the clearing and threatened Blanka with weapons raised.

Blanka did the first thing he could think of. He reared up to his full height, raised his arms high, and tried to imitate the cry Dan Hibiki had made during his brave battle with the jaguar. Unfortunately the best he could do was: "OwwooooOOOWOOO!"

The soldiers certainly weren't expecting a monster, and hesitated a split second before pulling the triggers on their weapons. Since his battle cry had worked so well, Blanka resolved to try the other thing he'd seen Dan Hibiki do: the roll. When he tried it though, it wasn't so much a somersault; rather, he underestimated the springlike strength of his tightly coiled leg muscles, which caused him to fly up off the ground, roll end over end through the air like a giant green beach ball, and slam into the first soldier, sending him sprawling with a WHACK against the side of a tree.

The other soldiers took the opportunity to bravely turn and run. Once they were gone, Blanka slung the unconscious man over his shoulder and leaped off into the night, exhilarated with his first victory. Wouldn't Master Hibiki be proud!

Using his knowledge of herbal medicine that he'd picked up after a life of struggling to survive in the jungle, Blanka managed to nurse the man back to health. After his initial shock at Blanka's appearance, the man, grateful to be alive, eventually told Blanka his story: he was escaping from a hidden compound deep within the jungle where knowledge gained from medical experimentation, using prototype drugs developed from exotic jungle flora, was being tested on human beings. "I don't want any part of it anymore," he said. "I want to go home."

The man's name was Eduardo Gracie, a member of a distaff branch of the Gracie martial arts family of Rio de Janeiro. Unfortunately he'd incurred numerous gambling debts with the local criminal underworld, and had been forced to use his fighting skills to serve their masters, the secret criminal cabal known as 'Shadowlaw', which had spread across the world from Thailand. Eduardo had nothing to offer Blanka in return for his help, so to placate his sense of honor he took upon himself to impart to Blanka some of his knowledge of jiu-jitsu, for which the Gracie family was famous, and a little capoeira, an ancient fighting style with its roots in Angola, brought over from African slaves and fused with the styles of Japanese immigrants to form a martial art all its own by martial arts legends such as Mestre Bimba. Blanka was a quick study with a vast amount of natural strength, as well as a tremendous measure of grace for one his size, and became an excellent student. He did have a flaw though. "Dan Hibiki?" he replied to Blanka's question with a puzzled look. "You say he has a famous martial arts dojo in Hong Kong? Sorry, never heard of him." Blanka felt sorry for the man. Obviously he'd never been out of Brazil, since the Saikyo-Ryu Hibiki dojo was world-famous!

In sight of the hills outside Rio de Janeiro, Gracie and Blanka shook hands and parted company; Gracie's secret testimony was subsequently recorded by Interpol and added to the steadily growing mountain of evidence against the evil secret organization, much of which was due to the efforts of the intrepid investigator, Chun-Li.

For Blanka, however, now was the time to perfect his own fighting skills, so he could one day be judged worthy to study at the feet of his idol, Dan Hibiki. But where would he find people willing to fight him? The world, he now understood, saw him as a monster, a freak.

His concerns faded, however, once he saw _her_.

An equally vivid red against the vivid green of the jungle background, her hair the coiled color of sunlight, long pale legs yet with a petite frame, the bow in her hair and the kerchief around her neck both the color of the sky, and her eyes like topaz. It was as if all the colors in the world had come to life just below him, where he saw her from the boughs of a tall tree, as she consulted a map with an irritated expression on her face. He felt, somehow, that it was vitally necessary at this moment to get her attention, even if it was only to be scared of him; in fact there wasn't really even time to consider just how she might react to his presence, as he leaped from the tree with a roar, feet slamming to the ground a few paces away from her. His arms raised. "OwwoooooOOoowowoooo!" he roared.

The girl, rather than being terrified, merely widened her eyes. "Wh...what? A BEAST!" In surprise, Blanka saw her immediately drop into a practiced defensive crouch, just like the ones Gracie had done. In a flash, he knew that this girl was strong, a fighter. The idea drove him half-insane with abject fascination. Had he more experience being around people he might have recognized, or someone could have told him, that what he had was a great big schoolboy crush.

"Wooooo!" he roared again, lowering his hindquarters and dropping to a crouch as well. "Hey cute girl! Let's fight!"

To his great surprise the girl lifted the back of her hand to the side of her mouth, bent one pinkie with great delicacy, and let out an EAR-SPLITTING LAUGH. "Oooohohohohohohoho!" Birds erupted from their nests in the trees. Small animals ran for cover. Distant herds of cattle stampeded in mortal panic. One delicate fist clenched, while the girl's other hand pointed a finger right between Blanka's eyes, which thusly crossed to observe it. "I'll fight you and beat you, if that is your wish. You'll fall prey to my fists! For they are the King of Beasts!"

Blanka didn't quite know what she was saying, but he liked the way she was saying it.

It was following this fight with Karin, which turned out to be the girl's name, that Blanka there and then resolved to learn more about the outside world. "I never thought such a creature existed," Karin had said, looking Blanka up and down while they tended to each other's wounds. "The world is so vast..." The world's immensity, beyond even Blanka's huge, sprawling jungle home, was more than he could imagine. He wanted to learn more! He wanted to meet more interesting people like Dan Hibiki and Karin Kanzuki.

Somehow the sign of the winged skull was also the key to much of what had happened to him. He believed, so he thought to himself, secretly clinging to the top of a bus of poachers to get himself a free ride out of the Amazon, that this was a spiritual journey of much the same kind being undertaken by his friend and would-be mentor, the mighty Master Dan. Could he do no less than answer the call? Once he did, he felt, he would truly be worthy of learning the secrets of martial arts at Dan Hibiki's feet.

Only time could tell if the world lived up to his expectations of it.


End file.
